I have reached the age where I’m unashamed of the thrill I got watching naked and tattooed George Baines caress Ada McGrath’s piano in his steamy shanty in the jungle of New Zealand. George was a half-Māori plantation overseer who fell in love with the mute and odd pianist, whose jealous husband chopped off her index finger to punish her adultery. An oddball, a bit broken. That he cleaned up for a woman was the measure of something like devotion.

Ten years before marriage, baby, and divorce, I worked in Washington, D.C., where Fred Litwin was a fixture on my walk to work and a fixture as well on the antiques scene, drawing moneyed clientele from The Hill. Mr. Litwin was a small wiry man with a few wisps of white hair, an intensely intelligent face, and one outfit: jeans, t-shirt, and a black bomber jacket. I was instantly intrigued by this octogenarian who commuted to and from Litwin’s Fine Furniture on a motorcycle with a red milk crate zip-tied on back and was often visible schlepping back and forth from his brick storefront to trucks that loaded or unloaded aged finery. I love old things and more particularly, old wooden things, so one day I cautiously stepped out of the brilliant noon-day sunshine into the shop. It was dark and cool, redolent with the smell of tung oil and mahogany, oak, maple, and cherry, and dotted with porcelain and silver. An old radio sent out Rachmaninoff’s Tristan and Isolde, more scratch than tune.

Heaven.

I had come armed with a conversation starter in case someone tried to sell me something I could not afford: Would stripping the finish from my antique mahogany desk lower its value? This was the question I posed when Fred Litwin schlepped over to ask if he could help me. A gray suit from Congress studying an expensive armoire at the back of the store called to Mr. Litwin--“Fred,” I would learn, was his preferred moniker--but the old man waved off the customer and sidestepped my question.

“I’m looking into the most beautiful brown eyes I’ve ever seen,” he called back, fixing me with his gaze.

I knew this dance. My Sicilian grandfather was a little man with muscles hardened by carpentry and though he didn’t wear a bomber jacket, he did let me, as a child, stand on his feet while he fox-trotted around the room to Frank Sinatra. Clinging to his legs, I took in an intoxicating elixir of tobacco smoke, sweat, and sawdust. “The apple of my eye,” he called me. The language of flirtation.

“That’s just my pheromones talking to your pheromones,” I said to Mr. Litwin.

“Pheromones?”

“The chemicals in my sweat.”

“I like what your chemicals are saying.” He put an arm through mine and I got a whiff of his leather jacket, the diffuser of his own pungent chemicals. “Come, sit down.”

He waved to an armchair with a cracked leather seat and took the worn ottoman across from me. In between was a rickety table patterned with circular coffee-cup rings and littered with donut papers.

“With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” he asked, leaning in.

“Melanie,” I said. “I work next door.”

“Melanie. The dark one in Greek.” He glanced at my chestnut hair. “Your parents chose well.”

I posed my question about the mahogany desk and Mr. Litwin reached under the chair to fish out an open coffee can of tarry liquid. His proprietary polish, he said, made with tung oil and something else that I don’t remember. He dipped a bit of rough cloth into the mix and rubbed the arm of my chair, which visibly brightened. But what I noticed were his beautifully shaped fingers, tapered and neatly groomed despite the nails black-rimmed by furniture polish. He seemed less interested in proving the mix’s effectiveness than in leaning close to me.

“I think you’re just trying to sniff me,” I said and winked.

“You’re right.” He winked back. “But don’t worry. I’m happily married--fifty years and counting.”

I was almost thirty years old, unpartnered and without prospects, and worried that I would miss out on motherhood. The idea was circulating that a single woman in her mid-thirties was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than become a mother. Propaganda that imbued dating with an air of desperation.

“What’s your secret?” I asked.

He thought I meant to a happy marriage, not to finding someone to marry.

“We have slept in the same bed for fifty years,” he said. “No twin beds. Same bed every night. That’s the secret.”

I didn’t ask him, that day, about how to find someone I loved enough to share the same bed for the rest of my life, because I was on my lunch break and he had customers. But his simple certainty about seemingly complicated questions, delivered with sparkle, would come to serve as a daily crumb of consolation. It instigated a habit that lasted several years: lunch with Mr. Litwin, me in the chair with a cracked leather seat and him, sunk down in his frayed armchair. I would wander in with a loaf of French bread and some butter or a container of cold eggplant and he would sweep off the small table then lay out our nosh as if it were fine dining. Good paper napkins appeared along with something he brought from home: a jar of honey to go with bread and butter or a tin of olives that he bit with his incisors to chew out the pit. Because the same font of wisdom was a messy eater who put the polish-stained finger in his mouth or talked while chewing, sending bits of food flying out of a mouth with a full set of intact coffee-stained teeth. He effervesced with opinions on everything, aware of every customer’s whereabouts while his eyes never left my face. I cannot remember the substance of our conversations. Only that, as we talked, he absently reached for the ankle of my crossed leg--I wore short skirts and pumps back then--and circled the bone with his finger as he opined. Not pruriently, not dirty-old-man.

George Banes, stroking Ada McGrath’s piano.

As a child I spent hours at my grandparents’ house. Nonno was a scrappy smoker and former pugilist, all hands and nose, while my demure grandmother--Nanna--was a fair-haired beauty with refined features and the quiet way of an impoverished princess who retained her noble ways. They fought each other constantly but both adored me, though I was partial to the mischief-prone grandfather who entertained me with cigarette tricks and houses built of cards from a tobacco-stained deck. One sweltering night, he scooped me up and laid me in one of the twin beds in his air-conditioned bedroom. The rest of the house was acrid from smoldering cigarette ash, but his room was cool and the bedsheets, light and dry. The next morning, he reported to Nanna, “She didn’t move an inch. She woke up just the way she fell asleep,” like a salesman’s I-told-you-so about a mattress guarantee. But Nanna objected to my sleeping in his room and by the time I was eight or nine, she won out. From then on, I slept in her double bed wearing one of her white smocked nightgowns, pinned up at the hem so I wouldn’t trip. I loved the princess attire but I preferred the cool comfort of Nonno’s room. My refined grandmother snored like a sailor…and I longed for my grandfather.

Nonno was the first to elicit such magnetism. I remember the day I followed him out of the house with my piggybank: He was buying a new station wagon to hold his carpentry tools, and I wanted to contribute. He returned a day later in a brand-new emerald-green Ford; inside was a small green foot-pedaled car for me. I was his queen, and I knew it. At any family gathering, a pat on his knee beckoned me to ascend the throne. His boney legs under my bottom were a delicious sensation as were the warm fingers that stroked the back of my neck as gently as if I were porcelain.

I was not touched this way by my mother, who likely suffered from a personality disorder, or my father, the dispenser of corporal punishment intended to placate her--I was the child conceived before marriage who deprived her of a college dream and ousted her as object of paternal love. My childhood was filled with her nearly incessant screaming. Nonno was my haven. The fists he raised toward Nanna stood in stark contrast to his gentility with me. I hated when he hit her but I never turned on him. There was no other place to get what he offered.

After five years next to Litwin’s Fine Furniture, our office moved six city blocks across town. Lunch with Mr. Litwin became impossible, particularly on humid July days when stepping outside was a collision with a wall of heat. Besides, I was busy. With men.

Six years earlier, on a flight between Boston and D.C., I had dozed off one seat away from a tall tweedy man my age. When the pilot announced our descent, I woke up and the man and I chatted briefly. He was a New York City-based script writer; I was an aspiring writer. Geoff scribbled his name on a page of the airline magazine and ripped it out. I accepted the offer, shy at the kind of male attention that never came my way. Jeers and catcalls, yes; but a handsome well-dressed man giving me his telephone number? I kept the magazine page, a talisman of want. It lay under the mess in my desk drawer, until one day while straightening up, I took it out. “You probably don’t remember me,” I announced after boldly placing the call, “but we met on a plane five years ago.” Yes, he did remember me, and vividly. “You fell asleep,” he said. “I thought you were beautiful.” Our two-hour conversation ended with a plan for him to travel, the next weekend, from New York City to the apartment I shared with two women in a D.C. suburb.

Seven days of no appetite and dreamy fantasies followed despite a forecast of late-week snow that evolved into a blizzard warning. Should I cancel? Should he cancel? Or should we simply go for it? Movie scripts were written about this sort of happenstance--we were living Nora Ephron’s next big hit.

We agreed: He would come. The trains would continue to operate even if the streets weren’t plowed.

Friday morning brought the smell of snow; noon delivered a whisper of fine soft flakes; but by late afternoon, we were swallowed by a humming storm. The neighbor’s house was invisible, a mere patch of fuzzy light across the street. Then the power went out and as my eyes adjusted, what had been dark became visible. Blowing snow had turned the landscape into a frosted white cake. The appointed hour of Geoff’s arrival came and went with no call, no text--this was pre-cell phones--and no way to know where he was stuck.

I was sitting at the kitchen table when a loud thump came from below, at the door to our parking lot. I heard my roommate’s surprise, then the deeper tones of a man’s voice. Geoff had indeed been stuck, but not on a train; rather, in the D.C. train station. He had left New York early to beat the storm. As soon as plows came out, he hailed a brave cabby. And now, here was the very tweedy, very tall man I had met five years earlier, with thick black hair and a boyishly handsome face. He had come bearing a paper bag with jars of olives and anchovies, a bottle of wine, and a loaf of sourdough. I could almost smell the New York City air.

I spirited him away from my roommates and we sat in the kitchen feasting and drinking by candlelight, eventually heading to my bedroom where he lay on his side, staring at me with a child’s adoring gaze. He wanted to hold and be held; he wanted to kiss. But George Baines he was not. I wore a white smocked princess nightgown that remained at ankle-length all night, and the next morning,  I slipped out from the tangle of sheets and caught myself in the mirror, a desirable but untouched beauty. How had he resisted? I told myself he had braved a blizzard; how could our meeting be anything other than propitious?

The promise of more sustained my relationship with Geoff for nine or ten months. We dined out and spent hours walking and talking and lying in bed. He loved me, but he could not allow himself to want me. He gazed at me until he was sleepy, then rolled away into thrashing nightmares. I was in a tug-of-war with an invisible opponent. The increasingly fancy dinners and theater dates were a measure of his fear. I thought wryly that Fred Litwin was too old to be a lover but not too old to want it while the handsome man I desired had no sap. Sleeping in the same bed would deliver neither desire nor enduring love.

I broke up with Geoff shortly after I met a man at a dance who pressed me against a wall for a hard, thrilling kiss and observed, “Your tongue is the perfect taste and temperature.” That relationship would end too. He was ten years older than me and done with marriage and children. He wanted to have “fun.”

For years I had a recurring dream that I found a secret door to a hidden room on the non-existent third floor of my childhood house. I alone knew the room existed and had to climb various ladders from my attic bedroom to gain entry. The room had high windows that let in light and brick-red kilim rugs underfoot. Two sideboards groaned with China and silver, but it was the old oak table that I loved best. The dream had a sense of urgency about it; I had to save the forgotten wooden things before the house burned down or was locked up and sold, which is what eventually happened in reality but not before, as a teenager, I had crawled around in the eaves and found an ancient copy of Emerson’s collected poems and a few old glass apothecary bottles. I was fourteen the first time I climbed out the attic window, onto the roof with a book in my hand, to crouch beside the chimney and read out loud:

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.

My father shouted that I was damaging the asphalt shingles, but that didn’t deter me. Perched on the roof, I whispered the words of T.S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and W.H. Auden and there, as well, I took up the habit of memorizing lines, carrying poetry like a thief with contraband stitched into the seams of her coat. During my lonely later years, I often woke with multiple books of poetry splayed among the tangled sheets and caressed them before jumping out of bed. I gave myself to words and they gave themselves to me, the tomes becoming cracked, worn, and dog-eared in the process.

Lovers all, broken open by love.

I was fifty-two when I set eyes on John, and I knew that day that I loved him. And knew that I wanted him almost as quickly. On our second date, spotting him first, I was startled by a powerful rising heat. What some call love at first sight was more like second sight, a limbic prescience. Want had to overpower the parts of my brain given to linguistic expression and over-analysis. Perhaps that’s why I trusted it. The first night we slept together, he knelt to unbutton me as delicately as if he were peeling a fig and leaned back, his face lit with joy.

“You’re beautiful!”

He was long and strong and hot, and he held my face in his hands for a long time, studying it before he kissed me. I remember the buttery smell of his neck, the way he cupped my chin as if he were sipping me, the delicious weight of him, a sinking into darkness and poignant hunger for the shelter of his body. Afterwards I slept soundly in the cave under his arm and for a few hours, there was no more ache.

Two years later, I was his bride and his widow, robbed by a galloping cancer. Among his belongings, I found a slim volume of The Wasteland, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and a collection of Neruda’s loves sonnets. Early on, John had confessed to being baffled by poetry. Then one night, he rolled over to face me and said, “I memorized a poem for you.”

I gave a little squeak of excitement.

“I’m nervous,” he said, “so if you don’t mind, I’d like to shut the light.”

He started, then fumbled, then started again. In the dark his voice was spare, like a bucket rising up out of a clear cold well.

I love your feet 
only because they walked 
upon the earth and upon 
the wind and upon the waters, 
until they found me.

“Neruda,” I had wept and reached for him.

Mere months later I would lie in the dark, weeping and frightened, attentive to his breath, his heat, and his silhouette under the covers, memorizing their poetry for the looming day he would be too soon gone.

The dream of a secret room had long ceased by the time John died. Mr. Litwin had also died decades before though I had managed to squeeze in a last visit before leaving Washington, D.C. to become a writer, or so I thought. Marriage, motherhood, divorce, remarriage, and widowhood lay between me and my first published work. I was still single, though my long hair was now short, my short skirts gone, and in their place, blue jeans and an anorak. I hurried into Litwin’s Fine Furniture and scanned the dim shop until my gaze landed on Mr. Litwin, older and a bit more bent. He schlepped over, overjoyed to see me, and pulled me into a welcome embrace that delivered the familiar whiff of his bomber jacket. The photograph that someone snapped shows a bald man reverently kissing the forehead of a pretty young woman whose eyes are closed to receive the benediction. In actuality, I was crying. That moment was a farewell and a bequest. Mr. Litwin loved me, and I loved him.

Forever, and from the beginning.

I write at the table from my old dream. I knew it wanted me from the moment I spotted it in the shop of a carpenter who made fine furniture from reclaimed wood. The tabletop was once the floor of an eighteenth-century farmhouse, worn to a satiny patina by generations of footfall. Its legs from a century-old sheep barn still exude the fatty residue of the woolly flanks that jostled against them. Each time I pass, I draw my fingertips over the surface, tracing the grain and absently circling the worn spots that need rubbing with walnut oil.

Fingertips like hungry mouths, savoring the taste of devotion.